Thought Leadership Video Series

Xerox's Kevin Horey discusses Xerox announcements at drupa

Published on May 29, 2012

Cary Sherburne talks to Kevin Horey, Xerox VP of Production Product Marketing, about the many announcements they made at drupa. Biggest among them is the iGen 150. They also discuss a big finishing announcement made at the show as well as waterless inkjet.

Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink, and I’m here with Kevin Horey, who is Vice President of Production Product Marketing at Xerox. Welcome.

Kevin Horey: Thank you, Cary.

Cary Sherburne: So, most of us in the industry or many of us in the industry spent some time recently in Germany at drupa 2012, and there was quite an array of announcements there. Why don’t you take us through a little of that.

Kevin Horey: Well, thanks, yeah. It was great to be at drupa and to be back from drupa, and we had a lot of announcements around our technology portfolio. And the biggest announcement was with our IGen 150. So we’ve taken IGen and made the portfolio bigger. We’ve brought more productivity to the product family, we built the IGen 150 on the award-winning IGen 4 with the color automation tools and we’ve added more speed, we made the matte dry ink, which we announced and brought forward on the IGen 4 as standard. We made the 26 inch stacker internally standard. And we’ve made a really exciting announcement around an automatic finishing solution which has been well received and was well received at drupa.

Cary Sherburne: And what was that?

Kevin Horey: Well, what we’ve done is, you know, we’ve always had the ability to put finishing devices in line with digital equipment. It’s obviously one of the value propositions, but what we’ve done now is working with some partners, especially PCP Borg, made this an integrative system where the solution makes booklets inline automatically, but we can also take output from other engines and to use the finishing – the booklet maker offline, which is really great. And we’ve automated the process so it’s touchless. So, a person would wheel over a stack of output, say from a Color Press 1000, they’d scan a barcode, the finisher would set itself up automatically, they put the cart into the sheet feeder, it would load itself and away it would go, start making booklets, which is just phenomenal because the use of the asset of the IGen is still printing another job to the stacker and now I’m using the booklet maker that’s attached to it to produce booklets. So it has been – it was really well-received at drupa.

So that’s really the big IGen news…

Cary Sherburne: And also, that takes away the whole, the inline, near line, offline, it takes away the whole argument because now it’s not an issue.

Kevin Horey: That’s right.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great, that’s great.

Kevin Horey: And a lot of our customers said to us on the show floor as well, now I can really start to think about how I do my load balancing, I can print on this engine and bring it over to that configuration. So that’s really the first step, we’ve done it for booklets; we’ll do it for more solutions, and so we’re excited about that. And IGen is a family, is really a portfolio now because IGen 4 stays in the portfolio with the award-winning output that it produces, so really, it was a great show for IGen, a lot of excitement around IGen.

We also introduced another Cypress product.

Cary Sherburne: Okay.

Kevin Horey: The Cypress 325. So we…

Cary Sherburne: That’s the inkjet.

Kevin Horey: That is the inkjet, yes. The waterless inkjet from Xerox that, you know, a big value proposition there is on the plain paper and we think that this resonates very, very well, especially in the transaction marketplace, but we’re also going to expand it and we, at the show, we showed some catalogues on some thinner paper and this new 325 mode or 100 meters per minute allows us to have a little higher image quality, up that to 600 x 600, so that also was very exciting news in Germany back in May.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great, that’s great. And so that is – and that one’s upgradable, field upgradable.

Kevin Horey: Yeah, and that’s the other – that’s a great question. It’s also part of the strategy, right. So a customer could say, well I don’t know if I need the speed of 500 feet a minute, or I might not have the volume, but you can start at the 325 and then you could upgrade it via software to the 500 foot per minute model. So it’s really an investment protection as well with the family. So that’s great. And we also introduced some ink optimization modes, which really, on the 500, which allows customers to choose how they want to run jobs. They might want a lower ink mass, reduce their cost. So we’re continuing to innovate and do things in our continuous feed inkjet portfolio, you know, and we’ll continue to do that as we go forward.

Cary Sherburne: And so for those folks who weren’t at drupa, they’ll have a chance to see some of this, probably at Graph Expo in the fall.

Kevin Horey: Yep, we’ll be looking forward to going to Chicago and showcasing these technologies at Graph, and you know, certainly the industry and we work very, very closely with our software partners, our hardware partners, and also our own workflow with really some great things that we work very, very closely together to bring the solutions that our customers want and really take automation and turn that into a productivity story.

Cary Sherburne: That’s great. We’ll look forward to seeing you in October, and ongoing into the future as you continue to evolve this portfolio.

Make print easier to buy. The Tweak Cloud offering is a toolset that streamlines the process of getting to a final agreed upon design. Jerry Kennelly, CEO and founder of Tweak describes the offering and his approach to giving the customer self-service control over the proofing process.

In this interview, Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor, talks with Max Dunn of Silicon Publishing about the company's clean sheet redesign of Silicon Designer leveraging the talents of former Adobe InDesign developers. This Web2Print/online editing solution is used by some of the world's largest companies.

Julie Shaffer, Vice President of Education and Marketing Strategies for the Printing Industries of America, explains the evolution of the Color Conference and its value to brand owners, printers and premedia professionals. She also discusses broader PIA educational initiatives and certification programs, including a customer service certification that will be available soon.